The present invention relates to server-side executable instructions.
Information servers, such as web servers, present information to users, for example, over a network. The network may be the Internet, an extranet, or an intranet. Examples of information servers include web, ftp and gopher servers. The users may view the presented information using client software, such as a web browser, on a client computer that is connected to the information server by a network.
The information may be generally divided into static information and dynamically generated information. The static information is produced and stored in an information file that is contained within a storage area associated with the information server. The server retrieves the information file from the storage area prior to presenting it to the user. The storage file may be a hypertext markup language (HTML) file, a structured generalized markup language (SGML) file, an extensible markup language file (XML), and so forth. The information file may be associated with formatting information stored in a separate formatting file. The formatting information specifies such formatting properties as a size or type of a font, etc. The formatting file may be represented in the extensible style sheet language (XSL), which is a declarative language for representing formatting information. An XSL translator (XSLT) applies the formatting contained within the XSL file to the information file to produce the formatted information presented to the user.
The information server executes a set of server-side instructions to generate the dynamic information just before it is presented to a user. For example, the server side instructions may direct the web server to present the data and time to a user, or even the number of times that a particular page of information has been presented to users. More complex server side instructions may retrieve information, such as a product catalog for an Internet merchant, from a database management system (DBMS) for presentation to a user. An interpreter on the server may interpret server-side instructions represented in a grammar corresponding to the interpreter to generate the dynamic content.
A variety of grammars are available for representing server-side instructions, e.g., server-side includes (SSI), PHP, Active Server Pages∩ (ASP) by Microsoft Inc., and Java Server pages™ (JSP) by Sun Microsystems Inc. The server-side instructions may be stored in a server side file or they may be embedded within an information file that also contains static information. Embedded server-side instructions are typically contained between a starting tag and an ending tag to delineate the instructions from the static information. The starting tag and ending tag are special strings that are only used to indicate the beginning and ending of a sequence of server-side instructions. For example, the strings “< %” and “% >” are used to indicate the beginning and the ending of a sequence of server-side instructions.